A Red Herring Without Mustard: A Flavia de Luce Novel

TWENTY-SEVEN

UP THE EAST STAIRCASE I flew, English Dissenters clutched in my hand.

I couldn’t contain myself.

“Listen to this,” I said, bursting into my bedroom. Porcelain was sitting exactly as I had left her, staring at me as if I were a madwoman.

I read aloud to her the footnote on infant baptism, the words fairly tumbling from my mouth.

“So what?” she said, unimpressed.

“Mrs. Bull,” I blurted out. “She lied! Her baby drowned! It had nothing to do with Fenella!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Porcelain said.

Of course she didn’t! I hadn’t told her about the encounter with the enraged Mrs. Bull in the Gully. I could still hear those frightening, hateful words in my mind:

“Gypsy! Gypsy! Clear off!” she had screamed at Fenella. “ ’Twas you as stole my baby. Tom, get out here! That Gypsy’s at the gate!”

Thinking to spare Porcelain’s feelings, I skated quickly over the story of the Bull baby’s disappearance, and of the furious outburst its mother had directed at Fenella in the Gully.

Mrs. Mullet’s friend had told her the Hobblers dipped their babies by the heel, like Achilles in the River Styx. She didn’t quite put it that way, but that’s what she meant.

“So you see,” I finished triumphantly, “Fenella had nothing to do with it.”

“Of course she didn’t,” Porcelain scoffed. “She’s a harmless old woman, not a kidnapper. Don’t tell me you believe those old wives’ tales about Gypsies stealing babies?”

“Of course I don’t,” I said, but I was not being truthful. In my heart of hearts I had, until that very minute, believed what every child in England had been made to believe.

Porcelain was becoming huffy again, and I didn’t want to risk another outburst, either from her, or worse, from me.

“She’s that redhead, then?” she said suddenly, bringing the topic back to Mrs. Bull. “The one that lives in the lane?”

“That’s her!” I said. “How did you know?”

“I saw someone like that … hanging about,” Porcelain said evasively.

“Where?” I demanded.

“About,” she said, locking eyes with me, just daring me to stare her down.

The truth hit me like a slap in the face.

“Your dream!” I said. “It was her! In your dream you saw her standing over you in the caravan, didn’t you?”

It made perfect sense. If Fenella really could see into the past and the future, and her daughter, Lunita, could impress the Air Ministry with her powers, there was no reason Porcelain couldn’t summon up such an unpleasant woman in her sleep.

“It was like no dream I’ve ever had before,” Porcelain said. “Oh, but God … I wish I’d never had it!”

“What do you mean?”

“It didn’t seem like a dream. I’d fallen asleep on Fenella’s bed—didn’t even bother taking off my clothes. It must have been a noise that roused me—somewhere close—inside the caravan.”

“You dreamed you’d fallen asleep?”

Porcelain nodded. “That was what was so horrible about it. I didn’t move a muscle. Just kept taking deep quiet breaths, as if I was asleep, which I was, of course. Oh, damn! It’s so hard to explain.”

“Go on,” I said. “I know what you mean. You were in my bed, dreaming you were in Fenella’s bed.”

She gave me a look of gratitude. “There wasn’t a sound. I listened for a long time, until I thought they were gone, and then I opened my eyes—no more than a sliver, and …”

“And?”

“There was a face! A big face—right there—just inches away! Almost touching mine!”

“Good lord!”

“So close I couldn’t really focus,” Porcelain went on. “I managed to make a little moan, as if I was dreaming—let my mouth fall open a bit …”

I have to admit I was filled with admiration. I hoped that, even in a dream, I should have the presence of mind to do the same thing myself.

“The lamp was burning low,” she went on. “It shone through the hair. I could only see the hair.”

“Which was red,” I said.

“Which was red. Long and curly. Wild, it was. And then I opened my eyes—”

“Yes, yes! Go on!”

“And it should have been your face I was looking at, shouldn’t it? But it wasn’t! It was that face of the man with the red hair. That’s why I flew at you and nearly choked you to death!”

“Hold on!” I said. “The man with the red hair?”

“He was beastly … all covered with soot. He looked like someone who slept in a haystack.”

I shook my head. In a weird way it made sense, I suppose, that in a dream, Porcelain should transform Mrs. Bull, whom she had perhaps glimpsed in the Gully, into a redheaded wild man. Daffy had not long before been reading a book by Professor Jung, and had announced to us suddenly that dreams were symbols that lurked in the subconscious mind.

Ordinarily, I should have written off the contents of a dream as rubbish, but my recent life seemed so flooded with inexplicable instances to the contrary.

In the first place, there had been Fenella’s vision—in her crystal ball—of Harriet wanting me to help her come home from the cold, and even though Fenella had claimed that Feely and Daffy put her up to it, the whole thing had left me shaken; wondering, in fact, if her confession was not itself a lie.

Then, too, there had been Brookie’s tale about the restless Gray Lady of Buckshaw. I still hadn’t decided if he’d been having me on about the so-called legend, but there’d been simply no time to look into it on my own.

I must admit, though, that these nibblings of the supernatural at the base of my brain were more than a little unnerving.

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“Oh, I don’t know, everything’s so confusing. Part of me didn’t trust you enough. And I knew that you no more trusted me.”

“I wasn’t sure about your clothes,” I told her. “I wondered why you had to wash them in the river.”

“Yes, you put that in your notebook, didn’t you? You thought I might have been soaked with Fenella’s blood.”

“Well, I …”

“Come on, Flavia, admit it. You thought I’d bashed in Fenella’s skull … to … to … inherit the caravan, or something.”

“Well, it was a possibility,” I said with a grin, hoping it would be infectious.

“The fact of the matter is,” she said, giving her hair a toss, then winding and unwinding a long strand of it round a forefinger, “that women away from home sometimes feel the urge to rinse out a few things.”

“Oh,” I said.

“If you’d taken the trouble to ask me, I’d have told you.”

Even if it wasn’t meant as such, I took this as an invitation to ask blunt questions.

“All right,” I said. “Then let me ask you this: When the man in the caravan was leaning over you in your dream, did you notice anything besides his hair?”

I thought I knew the answer, but I didn’t want to put words in her mouth.

Porcelain knitted her brows and pursed her lips. “I don’t think so—I … wait! There was something else. It was so ghastly I must have forgotten it when you woke me so suddenly.”

I leaned forward eagerly.

“Yes?” I said. Already my pulse was beginning to race.

“Fish!” she said. “There was the most awful reek of dead fish. Ugh!”

I could have hugged her. I could have put my arm around her waist and—if it hadn’t been for that curious stiffness in the de Luce blood that keeps me on an invisible tether—danced her round the room.

“Fish,” I said. “Just as I thought.”

Already, my mind was a flask at the boil, the largest bubbles being: Brookie Harewood and his reeking creel, Ursula Vipond and her decaying willow withies, and Miss Mountjoy with her lifetime supply of cod-liver oil.

The problem was this: Not a single one of them had red hair.

So far, the only redheads in my investigation were the Bulls: Mrs. Bull and the two little Bulls. The little ones were out of the question—they were far too young to have attacked Fenella or murdered Brookie.

Which left the obnoxious Mrs. B who, in spite of her other failings, did not, to the best of my knowledge, smell of fish. If she did, Mrs. Mullet couldn’t have resisted mentioning it.

Fish or no fish, though, Mrs. Bull had an obvious grievance against Fenella, whom she believed to have kidnapped her baby.

But whoever left the fishy smell hanging about the caravan was not necessarily the same person who fractured Fenella’s skull with the crystal ball.

And whoever had done that had not necessarily murdered Brookie.

“I’m glad I don’t think as hard as you do,” Porcelain said. “Your eyes go all far away and you look like someone else—someone older. It’s quite frightening, actually.”

“Yes,” I said, even though this was news to me.

“I’ve tried to,” she said, “but it just doesn’t seem to work. I can’t think who would want to harm Fenella. And that man—the one we found hanging from the fountain—whoever would want to kill him?”

That was the question. Porcelain had put her finger on it.

The whole thing came down to what Inspector Hewitt would call “motive.” Brookie was an embarrassment to his mother and had stolen from Miss Mountjoy. As far as I knew, he had no connection with the Pettibones, other than the fact that he provided them with stolen goods. It would be odd indeed if those two old curios had murdered him. Without her husband’s help, Mrs. Pettibone could never have manhandled Brookie’s body into the position in which Porcelain and I had found it. Even with her husband’s help—old Pettibone was so frail—they’d have needed a motorized crane.

Or the assistance of their friend Edward Sampson, who owned acres of rusting machinery in East Finching.

“I can think of only one person,” I said.

“And who might that be?”

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you.”

“So much for trust,” she said in a flat voice.

“So much for trust.”

It hurt me to cut her off in that way, but I had my reasons, one of which was that she might be forced to spill the beans to Inspector Hewitt. I couldn’t have anyone interfering when I was so close to a solution.

Another was that Brookie’s killer and Fenella’s attacker were still at large, and I couldn’t possibly put Porcelain at risk.

She was safe enough here at Buckshaw, but how long could I keep her presence a secret?

That’s what I was thinking about when there came a light tap on the door.

“Yes?” I called out.

A moment later, Father walked into the room.

“Flavia—” he began, then stopped in his tracks.

Porcelain leapt from the bed and backed towards the corner of the room.

Father stared at her for a moment, and then at me, then back at Porcelain again. “Excuse me,” he said, “I didn’t realize—”

“Father,” I said, “I should like to introduce Porcelain Lee.”

“How do you do?” Father said after an almost imperceptible pause, then sticking out his hand at once, rather than waiting for her to do so first. He was obviously flustered.

Porcelain came forward a couple of halting steps and gave him a single shake: up-down.

“Lovely weather we’ve been having,” Father went on, “when it isn’t raining, of course.”

I saw my opportunity and I took it.

“It was Porcelain’s grandmother, Mrs. Faa, who was attacked in the Gully,” I said.

What seemed like an eternity of shadows fled across Father’s face.

“I was saddened to hear of that,” he said at last. “But I’m given to believe she’s going to make a splendid recovery.”

Neither of them knowing what to say next, they stood there staring fixedly at each other, and then Father said, “You’ll join us for supper, of course?”

You could have knocked me down with a moth-eaten feather!

Dear old Father! How I admired him. Generations of breeding and his natural gallantry had turned what might have been a sticky situation into a perfect triumph, and my bedroom, rather than the anticipated field of battle, had suddenly become a reception chamber.

Porcelain lowered her eyelids to signal assent.

“Good!” Father exclaimed. “That’s settled, then.”

He turned to me. “Mrs. Mullet returned not ten minutes ago to retrieve her purse. Left it in the pantry. If she’s still here, I’ll ask her if she wouldn’t mind—I believe she might still be in the kitchen.”

And with that, he was gone.

“Crikey!” Porcelain said.

“Quick,” I told her. “There’s not a minute to lose! You’ll probably want to have a wash-up and change into something more … fresh.”

She’d been wearing Fenella’s dowdy black outfit for days, and looked, to be perfectly frank, like a Covent Garden flower seller.

“My things won’t fit you,” I said, “but Daffy’s or Feely’s will.”

I beckoned her to follow, then led her through the creaking upstairs corridors.

“That’s Daffy’s room,” I said, pointing, when we reached the west wing of the house. “And that’s Feely’s. Help yourself—I’m sure they won’t mind. See you at supper. Come down when the gong is struck.”

I don’t know what makes me do these things, but secretly, I could hardly wait to see how my sisters reacted when Porcelain came down for supper in one of their favorite frocks. I hadn’t really had the chance to pay them back properly for the humiliation in the cellars. My jiggered looking glass had backfired horribly, but now, suddenly, out of the blue, dear old Fate had given me a second chance.

Not only that but Mrs. M had turned up unexpectedly in the kitchen, which presented a perfect opportunity to ask her the question that might well stamp this case “Closed.”

I flew down the stairs and skipped into the kitchen.

Hallelujah! Mrs. Mullet was alone.

“Sorry to hear you forgot your purse,” I said. “If I’d known sooner, I could have brought it to you. It would have been no trouble at all.”

This was called “storing up credits,” and it operated on the same principle as indulgences in the Roman Catholic Church, or what the shops in London called “the Lay-away Plan.”

“Thank you, dear,” Mrs. M said, “but it’s just as well I come back. The Colonel’s asked me to set a few things on the table, and I don’t mind, really, seein’ as it’s Alf’s lodge night, and I wouldn’t have much to do anyway but knit and train the budgerigar. We’re teachin’ it to say ‘Eee, it was agony, Ivy!’ You should ’ear it, dear. Alf says it’s ever so ’umorous.”

As she spoke, she bustled about the kitchen, preparing to serve supper.

I took a deep breath and made the leap.

“Was Brookie Harewood a Hobbler?” I asked

“Brookie? I’m sure I couldn’t tell you, dear. All I knows is, last time I seen ’im slinkin’ round the church, I told the vicar ’e’d best lock up the communion plate. That’s what I said: ‘You’d best lock up the communion plate before it goes pop like a weasel.’ ”

“What about Edward Sampson? Do you know anything about him?”

“Ted Sampson? I should say I do! Reggie’s half brother, ’e is, a reg’lar bad bun, that one. Owns that salvage yard in East Finchin’, and Alf says there’s more’n old tin goes through them gates. I shouldn’t be tellin’ you this, dear. Tender ears, and all that.”

I was filling in the blanks nicely. Pettibone and Company, under cover of a quiet shop, an out-of-the-way salvage yard, and an eccentric religion, were operating an antiques theft and forgery ring. Although I had suspected this for some time, I had not seen, until now, how all of it fitted together.

Essentially, Brookie stole, Edward copied, and Reginald sold treasures removed from stately homes. The ingenious twist was this: After the original objects were copied, they were returned to their owners, so that they would seldom, if ever, be missed.

Or were the originals replaced with the copies? I had not yet had time to find that out, but when I did, I would begin by making a chemical analysis of Sally Fox and Shoppo’s metallic content. I had originally intended to begin with the de Luce lobster pick I had found in the hands of Timothy—or was it really “Timofey”—Bull. But the demands on my time had made that impossible.

With his gob full of sweets, Timofey had been very difficult to understand.

I smiled as I recalled the child mucking in the lane.

“Danny’s pocket,” he had replied when I’d asked him where he got his pretty digger. In retrospect, he was almost cute.

“And Mrs. Bull, of course. Is she a Hobbler, too?”

“I couldn’t say,” Mrs. Mullet said. “I’ve been told Tilda Mountjoy was one of ’em, but I never heard it said that Margaret Bull was, even though them two is as thick as thieves! Them ’Obblesr goes traipsin’ round to one another’s ’ouses of a Sunday to sing their ’ymns, and shout, and roll about on the floor as if they was tryin’ to smother a fire in their unmentionables, and God knows what all else.”

I tried to picture Miss Mountjoy rolling around on the floor in the grips of religious ecstasy, but my imagination, vivid as it is, was not up to it.

“They’re a rum lot,” Mrs. M went on, “but there’s not a one of ’em would let Margaret Bull through their front gate. Not in a month o’ Sundays! Not anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Somethin’ ’appened when that baby of ’ers got took. She was never the same after—not that she was much of a marvel before—”

“What about her husband?”

“Tom Bull? ’E took it real hard. Nearly killed ’im, they say. ’E went off not long after, and my friend Mrs. Waller said ’is wife told ’er, in confidence, mind, that ’e wouldn’t be comin’ back.”

“Maybe he went off to find work. Dogger says a lot of men have done that since the end of the war.”

“ ’E had work enough. Worked for Pettibone’s brother-in-law.”

“Ted Sampson?”

“The very one we was talkin’ about. A foundryman, Tom Bull was, and a good one, so they say, even though ’e’d ’ad ’is troubles with the police. But when that baby girl o’ ’is got took, somethin’ ’appened, inside, like, and ’e went off ’is ’ead. Not long after, it were, ’e was up and gone.”

How I longed to blurt out to her that the body of Tom Bull’s baby daughter had been found in the Palings, but I dared not breathe a word. The news had not yet reached the village, and I didn’t want to be accused of leaking information that the police would sooner keep to themselves—at least for the time being.

“You’d better run along and clean up for dinner, dear,” Mrs. Mullet said suddenly, breaking in upon my train of thought. “The Colonel says you’re ’avin company to supper, so ’e won’t want to see dirty ’ands at the table.”

I held my tongue. In ordinary circumstances, I should have lashed out against such an impertinent remark, but today I had a new weapon.

“Quite right, Mrs. M,” I heard myself saying, as I trotted instantly and obediently to the door.

Here I paused, turned dramatically, and then in my best innocent-as-a-lamb voice, said, “Oh, by the way, Mrs. Mullet, Vanetta Harewood showed me her portrait of Harriet.”

The clatter of dishes stopped, and for a few moments there was a stony silence in the kitchen.

“I knew this day would come,” Mrs. Mullet said suddenly in an odd voice; the voice of a stranger. “I’ve been ’alf expectin’ it.”

She collapsed suddenly into a chair at the table, buried her face in her apron, and dissolved into a miserable sobbing.

I stood by helplessly, not quite knowing what to do.

At last, I pulled out the chair opposite, sat down at the table, and watched her weep.

I had a special fascination with tears. Chemical analyses of my own and those of others had taught me that tears were a rich and a wonderful broth, whose chief ingredients were water, potassium, proteins, manganese, various yeasty enzymes, fats, oils, and waxes, with a good dollop of sodium chloride thrown in, perhaps for taste. In sufficient quantities, they made for a powerful cleanser.

Not so very different, I thought, from Mrs. Mullet’s chicken soup, which she flung at even the slightest sniffle.

By now, Mrs. M had begun to subside, and she said, without removing the apron from her face: “A gift, it was. She wanted it for the Colonel.”

I reached out across the table and placed my hand on her shoulder. I didn’t say a word.

Slowly, the apron came down, revealing her anguished face. She took a shuddering breath.

“She wanted to surprise ’im with it. Oh, the trouble she went to! She was ever so ’appy. Bundlin’ up you lot of angels and motorin’ over to Malden Fenwick for your sittin’s—’avin’ that ’Arewood woman come ’ere to Buckshaw whenever the Colonel was away. Bitter cold, it was. Bitter.”

She mopped at her eyes and I suddenly felt ill.

Why had I ever mentioned the painting? Had I done it for no reason other than to shock Mrs. Mullet? To see her response? I hoped not.

“ ’Ow I’ve wanted to tell the Colonel about it,” Mrs. Mullet went on quietly, “but I couldn’t. It’s not my place. To think of it lyin’ there in ’er studio all these years, an’ ’im not knowin’ it—it breaks my ’eart. It surely does—it breaks my ’eart.”

“It breaks mine, too, Mrs. M,” I said, and it was the truth.

As she pulled herself to her feet, her face still wet and red, something stirred in my memory.

Red.

Red hair … Timofey Bull … his mouth stuffed with sweets and the silver lobster pick in his hand.

“Danny’s pocket,” he’d said, when I asked him where he got it. “Danny’s pocket.”

And I had misheard him.

Daddy’s pocket!

Red and silver. This was what my dreams and my good sense had been trying to tell me!

I felt suddenly as if a snail were slowly crawling up my spine.

Could it be that Tom Bull was still in Bishop’s Lacey? Could he still be living secretly amid the smoke that blanketed his house in the Gully?

If so, it might well be he who’d been outside smoking as I crept with Gry past his house in the dark. Perhaps it was he who had watched from the wood as Inspector Hewitt and his men removed Brookie’s body from the Poseidon fountain—he who had removed the pick from Brookie’s nose when Porcelain and I—

Good lord!

And Timofey had found the lobster pick in his father’s pocket, which could only mean—

At that very instant, the gong in the foyer was rung, announcing supper.

“Better get along, dear,” Mrs. Mullet said, poking at her hair with a forefinger and giving her face a last swipe with her apron. “You know what your father’s like about promptness. We mustn’t keep ’im waitin’.”

“Yes, Mrs. Mullet,” I said.